What can math tell us about unfairness? Bias, discrimination, and inequity are phenomena that are deeply complex, context sensitive, personal, and intersectional. The mathematical modeling of social scenarios, on the other hand, is a practice that necessitates simplification. Using models to understand what happens in our social realm means representing the complex with something much less complex in order to study it.

Nonetheless, when used carefully models can help us learn about deep patterns related to inequity, including those that govern how unfair norms and patterns of behavior emerge in groups of people. They are especially useful in highlighting spaces of possibility. What might happen in the complex dynamics of the social realm? Once we answer this question, we can use experiments and experimental studies to learn more about these possibilities.

Read on, courtesy of OUPblog: https://blog.oup.com/2020/02/using-math-to-understand-inequity/